Syed Muhammad Umair Arif will defend his doctoral thesis entitled “Evaluating the Quality of Experience of Immersive Visual Systems in the Operative Control Rooms” on October 11, 2022.

Abstract

Augmented and mixed reality head-mounted displays have the potential to replace semi-immersive displays, such as widescreen LED displays and projectors, in control room environments to visualize information such as 3D models, maps, text, and videos. Mixed reality head-mounted displays have been widely adopted as an assisting tool for operators to interact with the blended world without visual interruption from the real world. Recent research has shown that immersive visual systems improved user performance during operations while also supporting high-level hu-man cognitive functions like alertness, attention, working memory, and visual perception. ITU-T made significant efforts to develop and enforce different evaluation standards for immersive systems in multimedia applications with passive viewing of content. In this work, four contributions are presented in the direction of mixed reality interfaces for safety critical applications First, we performed a comparative study on the traditional rendering interfaces and mixed reality which may be used for various safety-critical applications. Therefore, we designed the mixed reality application and tested it on traditional non-immersive and mixed reality interface. Secondly, we evaluated the spatial rendering distances to analyze visual experience in mixed reality, and we gathered user feedback on various projection distances within a mixed reality environment. In this regard, we developed three mixed reality applications with different rendering distances and performed a subjective study to collect the data. Lastly, we performed human factor study to measure reaction time of subjects in the mixed reality environment. We first estimated the detection accuracy through omitted, anticipated, and completed responses; then we related stimulus location, scene content and estimated accuracy. For this purpose, the area of stimulus presentation was divided into upper, lower, right, left, inner, and outer, to understand in which area responses were omitted and anticipated with respect to the central point of view. Experimental results show that, in addition to the saliency of the real scene, natural body gesture technology and limited field of view influenced human reaction time.